Hello! I just noticed the pricing structure (on UGS Pricing) has changed for Leaderboards.
It used to say:
“50,000 Active Users / Month, 500 Calls per MAU, 50 leaderboards stored per MAU”
It now says:
“Free for a limited time”
Anyone have any insight on this?
Thanks!
I have been working on my game on and off using this service for a couple of years and was taken aback when I noticed this change.
Not only has the old description been replaced with the most vague language possible, but I have no idea if this applies per leaderboard my game has.
Is this “limited time” shortened based on my number of leaderboards?
Does the price go up for utilizing multiple leaderboards instead of using 1 big leaderboard?
I am becoming more and more wary of using this service for my final game due to this lack of key information. If it is out there, they sure do not make it clear or easy to find.
Hi there,
I appreciate there is some ambiguity around the planned pricing for Unity Leaderboards, which are still free to use for now, regardless of the number of leaderboards or the number of players - but I can understand reticence to adopt a service where there is a lack of clarity around billing!
The recent change to the pricing page to list it as “Free for a limited time” removed references to Monthly Active Users and to monthly average request limits. I actually requested that we change the wording, as we were finding it was more problematic to imply limits, which were not actually enforced, as the wording was causing some confusion and was limiting for some use cases.
I can’t give more details at the moment but if it helps for context we are very happy with the service; there have been some really great games launch with Unity Leaderboards, including games on iOS, Android, Steam, Xbox, PS5 and Switch. This includes both cross-platform titles and games that support cross play, with millions of monthly active players and with hundreds of separate leaderboards.
We are have found that Unity Leaderboards has proven to be a popular service that nicely compliments other services like Unity Cloud Save and Unity Cloud Code and we have continued to invest in since launch by adding support for Score Metadata and for Cloud Code Triggers and in improvements to the documentation.
Best regards,
Iain
Thank you so much for your response Iain! I understand why you’d request that change (and I hope you understand why, as someone who was just checking in to remind myself of the conditions, it left me really concerned).
I’ve also been generally impressed by the service. But without knowing what it’s going to cost it’s very hard to commit to using it in a small project like mine – “free up to 50k users” makes it risk free until your game starts to scale. “Free for a limited time” feels like a very different proposition, even if I (sort of) understand the reason for the vagueness.
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Completely understand - you are probably not alone in wondering about why this was changed!
I really appreciate you calling out areas of potential concern.
The “up to 50k [Monthly Active Users]” framing was an attempt to be aligned with established framing for pricing of other services like Cloud Save, Cloud Code, etc and the sorts of number of Monthly Active Users a game would likely have before it starts making more API calls in a month than is covered by the free tier for those services.
For Cloud Save and for Cloud Code the free tier includes 1 million reads/writes/invocations and we were aiming to define a free tier level that made sense for Leaderboards given common use cases that involve multiple services:
e.g.
Obviously it’s hard to estimate accurately to fit all games, which is part of the challenge with framing by MAU and that’s why we changed the wording, but we’ve been trying to maintain the same level of free tier, based on measured and anticipated usage patterns.
I know that’s not as helpful as I’d like to be able to be, but hopefully it at least give some context until we can share more definitive details on what the pricing will look like!
Best regards,
Iain
hey lain.
if the leaderbord price is $0.03 , and i have a 120k MAU with ~1k income
70K MAU paid × $0.03 = $2.1K/month (since first 50K MAU would likely still be free).
my profit will be negative -$1.1K .
i have been using the leaderbord for 5 month and i have on it 250k players ,it will be hard to keep using it
if it become in paid, if it will be always free.. Oh god, that’d be so nice.
If you have a whopping 120k MAU but still make only $1,000 from them I would say you absolutely need to make adjustments to your monetization strategy!
You could be making ten times that! If not more.
well i hope it’s that easy.
the players 99% of them are from low eCPM Country , i’m using (Ads , Mediation , IAP).
my problem is Low eCPM only , cuz of that i only make ~1k a month.
eCPM Android = €0.60 , iOS = €1.10